Hi,
I have a short animation of a robot and I have a couple of questions about animations.

Question 1) I want to start a new animation - using the last frame of the current animation as the first frame of the new animation.
Is this possible?

I can begin animating again from this point - I know that - but that will just give me an even longer animation, and this one took 23 hours to render and disturbed my sleep no end.

So... now for :

Question 2)  Can I use the last frame of the previous animation as the first frame of the new animation - but filming from a different camera angle? (i.e. either moving the view to a different point or changing from the current Director's view to the camera view... if you follow me)

Question 3) Can I go back to a certain point in the middle of this first animation and change to either a different camera or move the current director's view to a different location and do a new animation from that point with the main character still following the same route but being able to slow things down a little this time - without loosing the rest of the route he took...?

Do paths have something to do with this?

Help!

(P.S. I now have the animation as an .avi, but it's 20.9MB)  um...

You should be able to just define which frames you want to render :-) Also you can even render out frames as a set of bitmaps, which means that even if your bryce crashes midway an animation render, you havent lost the frames it was already done with. Unlike some compressed animation formats which can get corrupted when bryce crashes before its done (its happened to me)
I think its somewhere in the animation setup or document setup or such... dont have bryce here so i cant check exactly but the setting should be there.

As for taking your last frame. Just select every object that gets animated, go to the last frame, and give them a key. Then go ahead deleting all animation keys before that frame, and eventually when the keys in ur last frame are the last keys left in ur scene, all your frames will have the position of your last frame. When you've achieved this you can delete the last keyframes which should still leave ur scene in tact. It's not a pretty work-flow by any means but i dont think bryce has an actual feature for doing this kind of stuff automatically.

Attached Link: Kanchi Nagao

In my oppinion It is not as easy as stated above, unless you animation goes in a straight line. For instance, when you render an flying object in a curve, Bryce will make that curve through the keypoints in a smoothing curve. Adding points will result in a Bryce extending the curve, but this has effect on the curve allready rendered. In particular the curve piece between the forlast and last keypoint will problaby changed. Resulting in a smooth flight but with a twitch at the seperation keypoint from first to second animationpart.  Have fun, Henny

Oh this is sounding hopeful.
Rayraz, I don't recall seeing anything about bitmaps (at college now, don't have Bryce here) in the animation set up dialogue, but I'll look more closely after work.

I didn't know you could give objects a key to themselves, I've just been marking a keyframe at specific points in the timeline - is that not correct?

"all your frames will have the position of your last frame"

Um... but I only want one single frame.

So that I can start again with more animation from that point/frame/position and create a new animation with different things happening, but beginning with that frame from the end of the last animation.

This is so that I can add this second animation to the last animation - in something like Premier Pro or Final Cut Pro and thus have a new animation with both clips in it but all smoothly running because of using that vital key frame from the end of clip1 for the beginning of clip 2... do you see what I'm getting at?

If I can do that once, then I can go on creating little animations that won't keep my computer occupied for days at a stretch, so that I can occasionally sleep or use the computer for other things, like work... (lol)  and yet still be able to string together all the clips to make a nice whole longer animation, later.

(That way I can add sound too!)

Yay!!!

**Kanchi,
**I'm not totally sure what you're saying there - but my animation is not straight - I've tried to upload it to shareCG - here:
http://www.sharecg.com/v/11051/animation/BillyBotAnimation1
Unfortunately I'm on a college computer and can't see it too well as this PC is feeble and so is the college network connection to the net.

If you can view it - you will at last be able to see what I mean about it not being straight.  The robot moves in a zig zag fashion in the scene.  Is that okay?

ok got ya,
well thats easy, after renderering (for instance 1 night) you can save the animation at that point. then copy the animationpart that has been rendered from the map (default is the Bryce map) to another map and rename it to the name it has and ad a 1 like "animation 1.av'" This is because otherwise the ready part you rendered last night will be overwritten. You can now close the application Bryce, and do with the computer what ever you want. When you want to continiou with your animation rendering, simply start Bryce, open you animationfile and continiou rendering. after this second night do as before. (Copy the animationmovie to the other map with name animation 2.avi) This is how i do it, as my renderes sometimes takes a few weeks. To combine the animation 1 en 2 i use VirtualDub, an little app freedownloadable and not so heavy as Premiere. and i save the uncompressed and compressed version.
Hope this is what you were searching for :)
Greets, Henny

Personally I think Ray has the best idea, and the way most pro studios do it is to render to a series of numbered bitmap frames. For several reasons - 1) you can re-render a subset, 2) additional post processing capabilities, 3) safety in case of a crash during render, 4) keeps your source loss-less.

Numbered sequences can be loaded into most vid editing software such as uLead, Pinnacle, or my favourite Premiere, then converted to the format you want avi, mpeg wmv etc.

Kanchi,

" save the animation at that point. then copy the animationpart that has been rendered from the map (default is the Bryce map) to another map"
 
What on earth is a bryce map?  I've never heard of that before.

"and rename it to the name it has and ad a 1 like "animation 1.av'" This is because otherwise the ready part you rendered last night will be overwritten."

Yes but if the first one was 4 seconds long and the second part is 4 seconds too, won't what you just said give you a new file that needs rendering but it'll take double the time (or more, as it's double the size)?  This is exactly what I'm trying to avoid.
 
"You can now close the application Bryce, and do with the computer what ever you want. When you want to continiou with your animation rendering, simply start Bryce, open you animationfile and continiou rendering. after this second night do as before. " 

Got that bit - that's the bit I'm aming for...

"(Copy the animationmovie to the other map with name animation 2.avi) "

map's again, completely confused by this new term, no idea where it is or how to find it or...anything...

"This is how i do it, as my renderes sometimes takes a few weeks. To combine the animation 1 en 2 i use VirtualDub, an little app freedownloadable and not so heavy as Premiere. and i save the uncompressed and compressed version."

Well as I already have Premiere and have been learning Final Cut (although I don't have that myself) and my tutor says if I can work in Final Cut , then Premiere won't be too hard to figure out, in which case I'm not intending to start a whole new program from scratch.  I'll stick with premiere, especially as I can use PhotoShop better with that than with a new thing like Virtual Dub.

I've got enough problems after 5, or is it 10? years of trying to learn Bryce - (maps yet???)  Sheesh!

Sometimes I dread Bryce7's arrival...

Gog,

"Personally I think Ray has the best idea, and the way most pro studios do it is to render to a series of numbered bitmap frames. For several reasons - 1) you can re-render a subset, 2) additional post processing capabilities, 3) safety in case of a crash during render, 4) keeps your source loss-less.

Numbered sequences can be loaded into most vid editing software such as uLead, Pinnacle, or my favourite Premiere, then converted to the format you want avi, mpeg wmv etc."

Yes, it sounds okay but how do you actually do that?

Quote - I didn't know you could give objects a key to themselves, I've just been marking a keyframe at specific points in the timeline - is that not correct?

Could be, I dont remember anymore how it worked exactly since i've not done animation in bryce for ages. I might have gotten the object-specific keyframing mixed up with 3dsmax... dont have bryce handy to check on it though. I'm guessing someone else will know to tell with certainty if i was wrong?

Quote -
"all your frames will have the position of your last frame"

Um... but I only want one single frame.

That's simple. Once all your frames have the position of your last frame.
Go back to frame one, add a key there. Then go back to the last frame, delete the key there and you can animate again at will. :-)

Quote - This is so that I can add this second animation to the last animation - in something like Premier Pro or Final Cut Pro and thus have a new animation with both clips in it but all smoothly running because of using that vital key frame from the end of clip1 for the beginning of clip 2... do you see what I'm getting at?

I would advice splitting up your animation in camera shots. Keep every shot in one file as long as you dont switch to another camera angle. It's usually a good thing to switch camera angles every now and then anyways, it keeps things interesting. But figuring out where and when to cut and where to put your camera is a whole cinematics thing that i dont know much about lol. It's kinda like working on composition i guess.

Quote - If I can do that once, then I can go on creating little animations that won't keep my computer occupied for days at a stretch, so that I can occasionally sleep or use the computer for other things, like work... (lol)  and yet still be able to string together all the clips to make a nice whole longer animation, later.

If you wish to shorten the stretches of rendertime I dont think forcing extra work to split up scenes is the solution. Just render out seperate segments of your scene. I think the thing to render to bitmaps is called "render to frames" or such.

Thanks, saving this thread for later work.  It's a pity Bryce won't let you save a different file for each different camera - and had a few more cameras - so you could get the whole movie - with all the different camera angles in one go.

Still I guess that's asking just a little too much of Daz.

Lol

It's not really customary to render the whole animation in one go anyways as it takes really long. Usually one would render part of the animation when the computer is not used and develop new parts of the animation in between. (or rendering on another system if you have the luxury of 2 computers)
I agree about the added flexibility of being able to have multiple camera's in one file though.

See this thread too.
www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php

I've taken a look at that other thread, hewee, thanks for that.  Some of it I understood, but not the lip sync bits - understandable as I'm not trying to do that, just robots and plasticene characters as yet - although come to think - there are a couple of bits where a frog says "gribbit"... hmmm.....

Will look into this some more.

Quote - It's not really customary to render the whole animation in one go anyways as it takes really long.

Yeah, you ain't whistling Dixie there mate!  Phew!

23 hours the last one and I was real nervous about leaving the laptop running in my room while I was in section - dread to think what the cleaners might do to it.

Quote - Usually one would render part of the animation when the computer is not used and develop new parts of the animation in between. (or rendering on another system if you have the luxury of 2 computers)
I agree about the added flexibility of being able to have multiple camera's in one file though.

Uhu.  It would be nice to be able to set another camera B linked to the object (but at a different angle to camera A) and have it follow a path while you move the time scrubber along and move camera A where you wanted it, and when you've finished, to be able to go to camera B and save the file again from that view and thus have the same animation but with two camera angles throughout already for you to edit... nice thought...

FranOnTheEdge,
It was more for the info about saving a render with frames and the good reason why it is is better.
I bookmark that thread and this one for the tips too because I had not done thing this way.
Don't know about the other things said there because that went over my head. :)